Location: Bolinas, CA
Medium: Painting, installation, street art, drawing, ceramics
Website: perrotin.com/en/artists/barry-mcgee
Barry McGee was born in 1966 in San Francisco, California, of Chinese and Irish descent. He received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. He has lived for many years in Bolinas, Marin County. He is represented by Perrotin Gallery and Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Walker Art Center, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Fondazione Prada, and the Bolinas Museum. He was chosen to represent the United States at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. He was previously married to artist Margaret Kilgallen, who died of breast cancer in 2001; he is married to artist Clare Rojas, with whom he shares deep roots in what critics call the Mission School.
McGee works across painting, drawing, installation, ceramics, photography, and street art, refusing all hierarchies of medium or subject. On the streets since the mid-1980s under the moniker Twist (and aliases including Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, and P.Kin), he views graffiti as a vital and democratic mode of communication. His trademark icon — a male caricature with sagging, exhausted eyes — is both self-portrait and elegy for the unhoused people of the Mission District. In gallery and museum settings, he builds immersive installations from hundreds of individual works: paintings on wood panels, drawings, found objects, scrap metal, spray paint cans, empty liquor bottles, tagged signs — assembled into accumulations that function more like communities than compositions. His work is informed by American folk art, Op Art, geometric abstraction, Mexican muralism, and sign painting.
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